Programming a Radio Station from a Programmer’s Perspective

How do you program a radio station?

Marquette, Michigan— Over the course of the past few months several listeners just like you have asked me

Marquette's 103.3 The Country Extreme

just how do you program a radio station? As the Program Director of Great Lakes Radio, Inc. and 103.3 The Country Extreme…let me run down a few simple programming rules…

It’s actually not as complex as you might think. The music that you hear is programmed into categories. For instance, we have 8 different categories that we utilize on 103.3 The Country Extreme. We break those categories up into the year when a specific song is/was released. The older songs you hear are in a ‘Gold’ category, and the latest songs you hear are broken up into Hot Currents, Medium Currents, Light Currents, and Upcoming Categories.

From there, you build a clock, and combine all these categories into that clock which break up into hour-by-hour clocks. There’s many different rules that break up artists, tempos, solo males/solo females, etc. Once you mix the music, it seperates all those attributes and creates your daily playlist. That in turn creates the music that you hear.